Your Attention, Please

Our attention spans are definitely getting shorter. I don't have any scientific evidence.....hey, pay attention, I'm not finished yet!

As I was saying, I don't have any scientific evidence to back this up, though I'm sure I could if I searched online. The problem is that whenever I do I get sidetracked by web sites that spit out your prison nickname after you enter your real one, show photographs of the world's best dental floss sculptures ranked by length of floss, mint or regular, and used or virgin, and of course the site I spend the most time visiting -- 404 Error. I never tire of that one.

Admit it, we're impatient. We watch TV with the remote in our hand so at the first sign of a commercial, station promo, or celebrity reality show featuring washed up so-called stars we've never heard of, we instantly start clicking our way through the other 122 channels. If a web page takes more than five seconds to appear, our itchy finger clicks the mouse and off we go. We have scan buttons on our radios, TV newscasters who have never met a headline they think deserves to be followed by a second sentence, and a host of condensed print media like Reader's Digest, Utne Reader, and USA Today. Depth is out, highlights are in.

Like dandruff, this problem starts at the top. President Bush admits he doesn't read a newspaper but would rather be briefed by his staff because "it's easier to digest." So are worms when a mother bird feeds them to her young, but that doesn't mean I want my dinner prepared that way. Bush's attention span is so short he couldn't focus on Osama bin Laden long enough to capture him so he turned his sights on Saddam Hussein. Unfortunately he forgot that he's not the only one with a short attention span. When he joined Diane Sawyer for an interview a mere two days after the dictator's capture, more of us tuned in to The Simple Life to see Paris invade Arkansas than watched Bush evade Sawyer. Of course he can console himself with the knowledge that he was more popular than a Whoopi rerun, but that's like being told you're not as obnoxious as Gilbert Gottfried. Faint praise may be praise, but don't forget it's also faint.

Britney Spears proved that she has a short attention span, so short that it took her less than 24 hours to tire of her marriage and have it annulled. Hopefully she'll work on that attention span before she has a baby. This proves that our attention span is getting shorter. In the good old days of stardom -- defined as the years when you had to be over 20 years old but didn't have to bare your stomach to be considered a star -- celebrities stuck it out when they got married. Sure Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney got married, divorced, married, and divorced again, but at least they gave it some time. Weeks, at least.

The media don't help. They really don't help by being plural and making sentences like that sound wrong. If the media's attention span were any shorter they wouldn't be able to finish a sentence. One week it's All Kobe Bryant All the Time, then before you can say mitochondrial DNA he's old news and Scott Peterson's the rage. Or was it Michael Jackson? Oh, I remember now, it's Child Abduction Week. No, that was last month -- this week it's earthquakes. I suspect newsrooms have a blackboard on the wall which lists the famous person, natural catastrophe, and trial of the week so reporters know what to cover at the exclusion of other news.

It's possible, though, that events actually happen in clusters. One train derails and within days we a slew of others are doing the same thing. One person dies while stowing away in an airplane wheel well and a week later someone else does it. It's been lord knows how many years since we've heard of that happening and it will be at least the same number until the next one. Yet they cluster. Either there's an Anti-Chaos Theory at work or misery truly does love company. And will spare no expense to find it. Or we can blame the media. I know which I choose.